“For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.”

May I speak in the name of the living God, who is our creator, sustainer, and redeemer. Amen.

The Feast of the Epiphany begins with people who notice what others ignore.

While kings are guarding power, priests are guarding tradition, and empires are guarding their borders, a small group of outsiders pay attention to the sky – and allow what they see to disturb them. They notice something that does not fit their settled explanations of how the world works. And instead of dismissing it, explaining it away, or domesticating it, they follow it. That decision – to notice, to attend, to follow – is the real drama of Epiphany.

This feast is not about God suddenly arriving on the scene. God has already come. Epiphany is about the slow, risky awakening of human attention. It is about learning to recognise what has been present all along but has not yet been received.

At the heart of Epiphany lies a gift without which faith itself withers: the gift of imagination.

Imagination is not fantasy or escapism. It is not wishful thinking or religious decoration. Imagination is the human capacity to hold open the possibility that reality is more spacious, more relational, and more surprising than our assumptions allow. It is the ability to resist shrinking the world to what feels manageable or safe. And it is this fragile, easily suppressed gift that sits at the centre of the Epiphany story.

The Magi are people shaped by imagination. They notice something that interrupts their usual patterns of meaning, and rather than closing it down, they allow it to call them into change – re-orienting their lives, re-shaping their journeys, and drawing them into a vocation they had not yet named. They imagine that the heavens might be speaking. They imagine that the birth of a child, far from palaces and power, could be bound up with the hopes of the world. They imagine themselves into a story that is not their own – and that imaginative leap sets them on a path marked by risk, generosity, and vulnerability.

Without imagination, there is no Epiphany.

The Magi do not begin with certainty. They begin with attentiveness. Their faithfulness lies not in possessing the right answers, but in refusing to close the mystery too quickly. They are willing to follow a question rather than control a conclusion.

And this matters, because imagination is the gateway to empathy.

To imagine that another person’s story matters.

To imagine that God might be at work beyond the boundaries we have drawn.

To imagine that vulnerability, rather than dominance, might be the place where truth is disclosed.

This is precisely why Epiphany is so unsettling – and why it remains such a threat to systems built on fear and control.

Imagination destabilises the stories that tell us the world must remain exactly as it is. It loosens the grip of inevitability. It makes room for mercy. And it is here that Epiphany collides sharply with our contemporary culture wars.

Culture wars are not sustained primarily by argument. They are sustained by the deliberate narrowing of imagination. They train us to see the world in rigid binaries: us and them, pure and impure, deserving and undeserving. They reward certainty and punish curiosity. They teach us to stop imagining the interior lives of others – their histories, their wounds, their fears.

When imagination contracts, empathy soon suit. If I no longer imagine your fear, I can dismiss your need. If I no longer imagine your vulnerability, I can justify your exclusion. If I no longer imagine your humanity, cruelty becomes possible – even respectable.

The tragedy of culture wars is not only that they divide communities; it is that they diminish our shared humanity. They train us to protect our position rather than attend to one another. They make selfishness feel like strength and indifference feel like virtue. Epiphany stands as a refusal of that narrowing of the human spirit.

Notice what happens when the Magi finally arrive. They do not interrogate the child. They do not demand proof or explanation. They do not attempt to master what they encounter. Instead, they respond with reverence, generosity, and humility. They kneel – not because they understand everything, but because they recognise that they are in the presence of something that exceeds them. Here is imagination shaped by humility rather than control.

Their gifts are not a transaction. They are not payment for certainty or insurance against risk. They are acts of recognition – ways of honouring what they do not fully comprehend. This posture stands in stark contrast to the culture-war instinct to dominate, define, and defeat.

Epiphany reveals a God who refuses to be known through force.

The child at the centre of the story does not assert authority or prove worth. God entrusts the truth of the incarnation to the slow, vulnerable work of human attentiveness and love – to the willingness of strangers to recognise holiness without controlling it. And this has consequences for how we live.

If God chooses to be revealed in a body that is dependent, fragile, and exposed, then imagination becomes an ethical responsibility. To encounter such a God is to be invited into a way of attending others that resists fear and reduction: to imagine that the person we are tempted to dismiss carries a story we do not know; to imagine that the person we disagree with is more than the label we have given them; to imagine that the one rendered invisible by our systems bears the image of God.

When imagination is alive, empathy becomes possible. And when empathy is possible, cruelty becomes harder to justify.

Matthew tells us that the Magi return home by another road. This is not a sentimental detail; it is a spiritual truth. Once imagination has been expanded – once empathy has been awakened – the old routes no longer suffice.

Epiphany changes the map. It changes how we attend to others. It changes who we recognise as neighbour. And so Epiphany presses a question upon the Church today:

Are we a community that expands imagination – or one that polices it? Do our words make space for empathy – or do they shrink it? Do we help people imagine themselves into the lives of others – or do we reinforce the fears that make exclusion feel necessary?

God has already come among us – not as an idea to be defended, but as a life to be attended to.

The question Epiphany leaves with us is not whether God has been revealed, but whether we will allow our imagination to be stretched enough to become more fully human in response.

Amen.